Washington – Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a titan of American academia, business and diplomacy who spent most of the 1980s improving Cold War relations with the Soviet Union and forging a course for peace in the Middle East, has died. He was 100.
Schultz died Saturday at his home on the Stanford University campus, where he was a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution, a think tank and professor emeritus at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
The Hoover Institution announced the death of Schultz on Sunday. No cause of death has been specified.
Shultz, a lifelong Republican, has held three major cabinet positions in GOP administrations during a long career in public service.
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He served as Labor Secretary, Secretary of the Treasury, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Richard Nixon before spending more than six years as Reagan’s Secretary of State.
Schultz was the longest-serving Secretary of State since World War II and the oldest surviving former cabinet member of a government.
During his lifetime, Shultz succeeded in just about everything he touched, including academics, education, government services, and business, and he was widely respected by his colleagues from both political parties.
After October 1983 bombing raids on the naval barracks in Beirut, where 241 soldiers died, Shultz worked tirelessly to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. He spent countless hours of shuttle diplomacy between the capitals of the Middle East to secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces there.
The experience led him to believe that stability in the region could only be ensured through a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he embarked on an ambitious but ultimately failed mission to bring the parties to the negotiating table.
Although Shultz failed to achieve his goal of putting the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel on the path to a peace deal, he has paved the way for the efforts of future Middle Eastern governments by legitimizing the Palestinians as a people with valid aspirations and a valid interest in determining their future.
As the country’s foremost diplomat, Shultz negotiated the first-ever treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s ground-based nuclear arsenals, despite fierce objections from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Reagan’s ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’ of Star Wars .
Pete Souza, White House via CNP / Getty Images
The 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was a historic attempt to reverse the nuclear arms race, a goal he never gave up in private life.
“Now that we know so much about these weapons and their power,” Shultz said in an interview in 2008, “they are almost weapons we wouldn’t use, so I think we’d be better off without them.”
Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who reflected in his memoirs on the “ highly analytical, calm and selfless Shultz, ” Shultz paid an exceptional compliment in his journal: “ If I could choose an American to whom I would entrust the fate of the nation a crisis it would be George Shultz. “
George Pratt Shultz was born on December 13, 1920 in New York City and grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. He studied economics and public and international affairs at Princeton University, graduating in 1942. His affinity with Princeton led him to have the school’s mascot, a tiger, tattooed on his butt, a fact that his wife recommended decades later. aircraft was confirmed. them to China.
At Shultz’s 90th birthday party, his successor as Secretary of State, James Baker, joked that he would do anything for Shultz “except kiss the tiger.” After Princeton, Shultz joined the Marine Corps and rose to the rank of captain as an artillery officer during World War II.
He holds a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1949 and taught at MIT and at the University of Chicago, where he was dean of the business school. His board experience included a period as a senior staff economist in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Board of Economic Advisors and as Nixon’s OMB Director.
Shultz was president of the Bechtel Group construction and engineering company from 1975-1982 and taught part-time at Stanford University before joining the Reagan administration in 1982, replacing Alexander Haig, who resigned after frequent clashes with other members of the administration.
A rare public disagreement between Reagan and Shultz came in 1985 when the president ordered thousands of government employees with access to top classified information to take a “lie detector” test as a way to plug information leaks. Shultz told reporters, “The time in this administration when I am unfamiliar is the day I leave.” The administration soon withdrew from the question.
A year later, Shultz submitted to a government test that was considered much more reliable.
A more serious disagreement concerned the secret arms sales to Iran in 1985 in hopes of securing the release of US hostages held in Lebanon by Hezbollah militants. Although Shultz objected, Reagan went ahead with the deal and millions of dollars from Iran went to right-wing Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. The ensuing Iran-Contra scandal engulfed the government, much to Shultz’s dismay.
In 1986, as testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he complained that “nothing ever settles in this town. It’s not like running a business or even a university. It’s a swirling debating society where the debate never ends. , in which people never give up, including me, and that’s the atmosphere in which you administer. ″
After Reagan left office, Shultz returned to Bechtel, the longest-serving Secretary of State since Cordell Hull under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He retired in 2006 and returned to Stanford and the Hoover Institution.
In 2000, he became one of the first proponents of George W. Bush’s presidential nomination, whose father had been vice president while Shultz was secretary of state. Schultz served as the campaign’s informal adviser.
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Shultz remained a staunch supporter of gun control in his later years, but retained an iconoclastic slant and spoke out against several mainstream Republican policy positions. He created some controversy by calling the war on recreational drugs defended by Reagan a failure and raised eyebrows by labeling the long-standing US embargo on Cuba as “insane.”
He was also a prominent proponent of efforts to combat the effects of climate change, warning that ignoring the risks was suicidal.
A pragmatist, Shultz, along with Kissinger, made headlines during the 2016 presidential campaign when he refused to support Republican candidate Donald Trump after being quoted as “ God help us ” when asked about Mr. Trump’s possibility in the White House.
Shultz was married to Helena “Obie” O’Brien, an army nurse he met in the Pacific during World War II, and they had five children. After her death in 1995, he married Charlotte Maillard, San Francisco’s chief of protocol, in 1997.
Shultz received the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1989.
Survivors include his wife, five children, eleven grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.